"Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success."
-Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
Overview
A human-centered approach enhances the creation of exceptional outcomes... but we didn't have a consistent framework at FM Global. Our Vision team set out to work ahead of potential market disruptors and prevent disruption in delivery. We understood early on that if we were to succeed as a company, we would need to prepare ourselves individually, on teams, and as an organization
The Challenge
Unify the Design team on a user-centered delivery framework. Understand the landscape of challenges and organize a team structure that would allow for the critical adoption. Now, how do we expand that beyond our design team to the rest of the organization?
Issues we have to overcome:
• Section Silos, areas of focus are very different
• Competing frameworks or methods
• Design is constantly proving itself
• Designers aren't driving the experience
• We aren't strategic, we are reactive. We need to be both.
• "If we do more research, it will slow everything down"
• "Our Users will get burned out."
• "It's just workshops and post-its"
Team
Two Design Thinkers
Two Researchers
One Design Developer
In an ideal world, we would want to balance the Desired State. We need to meet our partners where they are at.
Opportunity Space
There are many ways to prepare an egg, as there are many ways to work in design. Our executive leadership set the expectation that we, as a company, "need to double down on client-centricity," What better way to be client-centric than Design Thinking? If we are truly user centric, our process in developing experiences needs to change. Our focus should depend on prioritized insights from research we gather from our users so we can match it against our desired business outcomes.
Easier said than done, of course, but where do we start? Our plan focused on getting leadership to make informed decisions on their clients/users by sharing what we learned in Strategic Exploration. We need to align and educate the design team on Design Thinking. We would eventually spread this to the rest of the organization, and how do all of this? By getting everyone to try it themselves.
Understand...everything
With the number of designers on our team, we started with interest surveys to understand what the team was interested in learning. A large majority said they would like to learn more about Design Thinking and apply it to their project work.
We then started to plot out what Design was working on in the digital space and found opportunities to apply Design Thinking, we did this by talking to people. We would have research sessions with our team to understand what they were trying to accomplish, their goals, and what was holding them back. We mentored and found opportunities to apply some methods from the Design Thinking toolbox.
We also conducted a broad range of research with our clients to understand how we could best support them in a digital experience. We had interviews with clients and the client service team that supports our clients. We created visuals that we put in front of users to understand and prioritize what they wanted us to focus on; this is observing at its finest.
It took a lot of planning and organization
Now how do we communicate our story so its effective on teams?
The Solution
Design Thinking U
My team and I assembled an immersive training program for our design team then eventually all employees to allow individual business units, project teams, and other groups to learn the value of design thinking by doing it themselves. They would learn how to apply the Design Thinking approach in their everyday projects.
We would run individuals through visioning workshops so they get a hands on approach to Design Thinking. This Accelerated Visioning workshop would allow them to practice it on projects they were working on while understanding their role using Design Thinking. This workshop explained essentials like commander's intent, why we have empathy and many tools they can use daily on their projects.
Alignment
It brings together everyone under a distinct approach that prioritizes the customer's needs over the varied objectives of different individuals We all start from the same place.
Culture change is hard
We need to empower our teams to execute with confidence. We need to ensure trust in our partners and make sure we are communicating with them as effectively and often as possible.
Learn to fail
In order to deliver the best experience to our users, its going to take a lot of testing. The best way we can test, is by building our products with our users. Give them the opportunity to brainstorm with us, and allow understand along the way. We are going to fail a lot, but we learn from failure. Participatory design is essential in our work.
Team Structure
We thought about preparing our design teams for success, and for that to work, we would need to mix teams up a bit and work with our partners to ensure a cohesive environment. We created a plan with our product partners on what the team dynamic should be and set expectations on how each role delivers its expertise. See more of this in the Strategic Exploration Project.
Sharing is caring
How might we communicate our plan of delivery to the broader organization? We show what a loose roadmap could look like and the milestones that take place. We would use this artifact to share with stakeholders and leadership.
Outcomes
We were able to run many teams through a Design Thinking framework. We knew we had to work with teams individually to understand their blockers and assess their user centricity. Over time we were able to provide tips, and eventually work with teams on continuous delivery.
Culture takes a long time. Of course it takes hard work and dedication but really it comes down to simply talking to people to understand what they are encountering on their projects. Working with them on new ways to overcome obstacles and generate new ideas.
Lessons Learned
A Hopes and Fears session would have been good early on with stakeholders and team to understand what they hope to accomplish this year and what they fear could disrupt us.
Playback, playback, playback. Anytime you can inform your leadership along the way is essential, even if it's a deck that explains what's happened throughout a couple of weeks. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it should be effective.